The Who's Who In Bitcoin

The Bitcoin industry has grown tremendously since Bitcoin was released to the public in January 2009. Over $1B of investment into Bitcoin and blockchain companies has taken place resulting in thousands of companies and hundreds of thousands of individuals involved from around the world.

A Week With Dr. Adam Back

Dr. Adam Back is the premier expert in the world on blockchain technology and is currently pioneering the sidechains project for the core Bitcoin protocol.

He has worked on e-cash protocols since 1995 as an applied cryptographer and is cited in both the TOR whitepaper and Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto and is the inventor of the Hashcash proof-of-work which is used for the decentralized mining used for Bitcoin security.

He was an architect and cryptographer at Zero-Knowledge Systems working on its Freedom network, a precursor to Tor. Most recently, Adam co-founded Picorp which was acquired by EMC.

He holds a Ph.D. in distributed systems and computer science from the University of Exeter.

Companies

Bitcoin Core

Bitcoin Core--formerly Bitcoin-Qt--is a Bitcoin codebase based on the original code and framework published by Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin Core is currently run by more than 70% of Bitcoin nodes and all miners, making it the most widely used Bitcoin client. Note that Bitcoin Core is not a company.

Blockstream

Blockstream is one of the most-well funded Bitcoin companies, with $76 million in venture capital thanks to its latest $55 million funding round. Its core purpose is to improve Bitcoin's utility with sidechains.